It’s been a big couple of years for gravity and the people who study it. Astronomy contributor Jean Creighton joins Lake Effect each month to talk about space - near, far, and in between each month.
This month, the director of UWM's Manfred Olson Planetarium discusses the collision of two neutron stars and the global effort behind capturing the event. “There were seventy telescopes that were able to observe in all continents, including Antarctica, across all light ways from gamma rays all the way to radio. Everybody saw it."
Creighton says, “Just around the gravitational wave time, a gamma ray burst went off... The fact that the two happened together in the same galaxy told us that what we had suspected for some time, that these short gamma ray burst come from two compact object colliding, was confirmed."
Lake Effect's Bonnie North and Creighton discuss the data collected and the importance of the scientific knowledge gained:
